


One Of These Days, Something Inside's Going To Break

by Tazza1993



Category: Emmerdale
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 08:35:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10081631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tazza1993/pseuds/Tazza1993
Summary: Sometimes Robert thought that he would never be able to atone for all the terrible deeds he had committed. Today, as Aaron's eyes had bore into him, waiting for him to let him down once again, he had been proved right.Set after Aaron asks Robert if he had Gordon killed.For Robron Week (the jukebox prompt).Inspired by Dark Places by the Gaslight Anthem.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This sort of just happened. Became more of a Robert Sugden character exploration than anything else. Tortured Robert is a Rob I wanted to explore more, evidently. 2000+ words of angst and regret.
> 
>  
> 
> If I thought it would help I would drive this car into the sea,  
> And if the fire and the smoke and the explosions could speak for me,  
> And if the words that I used to try to explain,  
> How something inside of me started to break,  
> I would.  
> One by one my words just got in the way.  
> How many nights did I crash against the waves,  
> With my head going under?  
> How many days did I spend trying to see it your way?  
> If you try you'd remember.  
> I changed and changed and kept on saying one of these days something inside's going to break,  
> And we won't get it back now baby,  
> Something's gonna break.  
> And if I thought it would help I would carve your name into my heart.  
> If I thought it would help I would carve your name into my heart.  
> And if I thought it would help I would carve your name into my heart.  
> If I thought it would help I would carve your name into my heart.  
> All of the things that I tried to explain,  
> How something inside of me started to break,  
> We were living proof,  
> One by one we drifted away.  
> One by one we drifted away.  
> Time after time there were things that would scare me to tears,  
> While you called me haunted,  
> I paced around the bed where you lay,  
> One of these days baby,  
> Something's going to break.  
> And if I thought it would help I would carve your name into my heart.  
> And if I thought it would help I would carve your name into my heart.  
> And if I thought it would help I would carve your name into my heart.  
> And if I thought it would help I would carve your name into my heart.  
> All of the things that I tried to explain,  
> How something inside of me started to break,  
> We were living proof,  
> One by one we drifted away.  
> Drifted away,  
> One by one and day by day I became the dark in the places where you lay.  
> And if I thought it would help I would carve your name into my heart.  
> And if I thought it would help I would carve your name into my heart.  
> And if I thought it would help I would carve your name into my heart.  
> And if I thought it would help I would carve your name into my heart.  
> All of the things that I tried to explain,  
> How something inside of me started to break,  
> We were living proof,  
> One by one we drifted away.  
> One by one we drifted away.  
> We were living proof,  
> One by one we drifted away.  
> (Dark Places, The Gaslight Anthem)

 

Robert had a bottle of whiskey in his hands and thoughts that he was desperate to block out in his head. The closer his feet carried him towards Wylie's Farm, the more pressing the need to turn tail and run in the opposite direction became. Robert was good at running away - always had been and always would be. He forced himself to remember the look in Aaron's eyes as he had asked him if he was responsible for Gordon's death. It was a look that had told him that Aaron was just waiting for Robert to let him down, like he had so many times before. Sometimes Robert thought that he would never be able to attone for all the terrible deeds he had committed. Today, as Aaron's eyes had bore into him, waiting for him to let him down once again, he had been proved right.

 

Robert understood now that you could bend over backwards to change - to become a better man, Robert Sugden 2.0 - but people would still always look at you and see the terrible things you had done in the past. The new and improved Robert Sugden (the Robert that Aaron deserved) wasn't unfaithful to people he claimed to love. Nor did he burn down caravans, go out of his way to break his only brother's heart, humiliate the aforementioned brother in public just for the hell of it, meticulously arrange fake robberies, hire hitmen, suffocate people in grain pits, wave guns in people's faces or use blackmail as a weapon (or at least only when left with no other option). Yet, the spectre of the old Robert Sugden (the Robert that Aaron had wished death upon) still lingered everywhere he went. Paddy still couldn't look at him with anything other than disgust etched on his features (and Robert couldn't look at him without seeing him up to his neck in grain). Chas took every possible opportunity to imagine the worst of him. Even Aaron - Aaron who loved him despite everything - was willing to believe terrible, cold blooded, psychopathic things about him. Aaron had seen the worst parts of Robert too vividly, too many times, to see him as anything other than a let down. A mistake in waiting. A disappointment.

 

Nobody that had ever loved Robert had expected him to do anything other than disappoint them. Not since his mother had died while Robert stood helplessly by. That had been his first mistake. After that, the mistakes had came thick and fast and constant. Jack, Andy, Victoria, Diane, Katie, Chrissie had all looked at Robert with expectant eyes and waited for his next mistake. They had all loved him, in their own ways, but didn't expect anything other than pain for loving him. They loved him with eye rolls and judgement. And Robert had not been able to help proving their scepticism well founded over and over. See him as a liability? Robert would endanger his brother's life and accidentally kill a friend to prove you right. Expect him to cheat on you? Robert would fall in love with the local mechanic and pursue him with single minded ferocity. Expect him to go out of his way to spite you? Robert would seduce your wife and convince her to leave you for him. Expect him to go to extreme lengths to conceal the affair you had discovered he was embroiled in? Robert would raise you an angry confrontation that would see you plummet through rotten floorboards to your death. Robert had always taken people's suspicions about him and presented them with an even more nightmarish reality. It was what he did, what he had always done.

 

Then, there was Aaron. Aaron with his expectant eyes and blunt words. At the beginning, he had expected more of him, wanted him to come clean about who he was even when doing so had felt impossible to Robert. He had looked at him and asked him to be better. Aaron, who Robert had hurt time and time again, in almost every way suffering could be inflicted on another person. He had lied to him, neglected him, said the most hurtful of words to him. He had physically injured him, driven him to physically hurt himself. He had harmed his loved ones. He had screamed I love you at him, like a knife. Or, like a gun, that he was waving in his face. And even after all that, he had still tried his upmost to see the best in Robert ("I want to be able to rely on you, Robert."). But he couldn't forget, couldn't help but remember what Robert was capable of.

 

Wylie's Farm loomed large in front of him like a nightmare. Robert had certainly seen it in his nightmares enough times since that fateful February day. It was supposed to have been Andy and Katie's future. Now, it was nobody's future. Instead, it was Robert's inescapable past, one of his most unforgiveable mistakes. He didn't want to open the front door and go inside, but then Katie hadn't wanted to die, had she? She had though, so Robert forced himself inside. He knew the exact spot where her body had rested, her neck crooked, like he knew the palm of his hand. It was hard to forget when you had looked down into the face of someone that you once loved and known that you were responsible for their death. It was harder to forget once you had looked at the man you loved, looking at someone you had unwittingly killed and seeing what you were capable of. It was impossible to forget once you had witnessed your brother cradling his first love's corpse and howling like a wounded animal. He sat down on the floorboards where Katie had died and pulled his knees up to his chest. He took liberal swigs of whiskey (it wasn't terribly unlike sitting in the fields and tasting stolen vodka after exceptionally vitriol filled arguments with his father as a teenager) and he remembered. There were a lot of mistakes to remember - it was a good job that Robert had nowhere in particular to be.

 

Robert had never been good with whiskey. It had a tendency to make him morose. The desolate farmhouse was silent. Silent, as death. Quiet as a corpse. For a man who hadn't yet seen his thirtieth birthday, Robert lived with a lot of corpses.

 

Robert hadn't seen his mother die, but he had heard it. That particular tragedy wasn't his fault (Andy held that particular honour) but it was one of his biggest regrets. Robert hadn't been able to save her, had just cried as she had burned. After that, Robert had lost the person who had loved him most and Jack had never been able to look at him the same. Maybe it was because Robert was a constant reminder of Sarah. Maybe it was because Robert hadn't been able to contain his bitterness towards Andy after that and when push came to shove Jack would always choose Andy. Maybe it was because Robert had not even tried to save his mother, Jack's wife. It had been Robert's first experience of real, meaningful, gut wrenching death. It had been his first trip to a graveyard, his first real heartbreak, his first tears of grief.

 

The second death on his conscience was Max. It had been fire that had taken him, too. (Robert fucking hated fire). When the flame engulfed car had burned out, and only regret and Max's charred body remained, Jack's fraying patience with Robert had also burned out. He had been sent away because people around him ended up hurt or dead. Robert had never found it in himself to forgive his father. He had tried so hard to mould himself to Jack's ideal. He had dampened down his desire to kiss boys, once he saw that his liaison with the farmhand had diminished the already scarce pride for Robert in Jack's eyes. He had lugged around hay bales and talked about a future on the farm because it fitted Jack's idea of masculinity. It had never been enough. Nothing had ever been enough for Jack as far as Robert was concerned. Not when Andy was there - wanting the farm, wanting only girls, wanting the perfect nuclear family, without even trying. Now, Jack was lying dead in the graveyard too, and Robert missed him and loved him but he also hated him. He would have died for his father, killed for Jack Sugden. But then, he had wanted to kill him a few times, too.

 

Between that, throughout all that, had been Katie. She had been beautiful and sweet and Robert had wanted her. He had wanted someone to look at him and see something worth having. He had won her from Andy, only to realise that she wasn't enough to plug the hole inside of him. Andy had never really forgiven him for that and Robert hadn't been able to bring himself to care. After all, he hadn't forgiven Andy for taking their mother away, for being their father's favourite. Later, Robert had taken Katie away from Andy, in a more permanent way. There was nothing more permanent than death. He hadn't loved her then, but he certainly hadn't wanted her dead either. By the time he had watched Aaron running himself into the ground to escape the guilt her death had burdened him with, Robert would have done almost anything to resurrect her. The worst thing was, as Robert sat huddled on the ground, cradling his whiskey like the child he had once been, Robert wasn't entirely sure that was the whole truth. Katie dying had been one less complication for Robert to deal with and, even with Andy wallowing in grief and Aaron falling to pieces, Robert had felt gratitude for that. It had been acute and tampered down by guilt, regret, sadness and nostalgia, but it had been there nevertheless. Then again, Katie's death had only presented Robert with more problems to deal with. Andy on a quarry's edge, Aaron on a quarry's edge, Robert drowning his sorrows with Lawrence's expensive liquor, Aaron lying half dead in a forest, Paddy needing to be silenced. Robert's life had never been the same after Katie's death. It wouldn't have been the same if she had lived either. Her lifeless eyes haunted Robert now she was dead. Her malicious words would have ripped Robert's life apart if she had been alive. Robert's head and intentions had always been a tangled mess when it came to Katie and that hadn't changed with her death. No wonder Aaron doubted him - he couldn't even bring himself to regret killing his brother's wife properly.

 

Aaron. Whiskey and Wylie's Farm and the chill of his memories couldn't dim Robert's love for Aaron. Aaron who had professed his love for Robert for the first and only time, just a floor above where Robert was sitting. Wylie's farm was death and love and fear and guilt and relief for Robert. That was why he was here. It was Aaron's pleas and Katie's threats and Andy's sobs. It was Aaron's lips against his and Katie's pulseless skin under his fingers. The past and the future. Robert's millstone. Robert's penance.

 

Through all of his guilt, Robert knew that he could have been sitting here with more corpses on his conscience. Chas and Paddy - Robert had been a hair's breadth from killing them both. Andy. Aaron. Robert shuddered at the thought. Two people who hated him and two people who loved him. Even now, Robert knew which two he would have chosen to die, just as he was horribly aware of how much of a terrible person that made him.

 

Robert hadn't allowed himself to think about any of this for such a long time. He had wanted to leave it in the past, focus on rebuilding a new Robert. But then, Aaron had looked at him, remembered the old Robert, the one who had almost killed him. And he asked if Robert had killed Gordon. Robert had wanted to kill Gordon. Every time he had held Aaron in his arms to ease him out of a nightmare, Robert had wished Gordon dead. But he would never have actually killed him. (That was another terrible, haunting thing about Robert Sugden - he was a liar. He had lived with lies his entire life. He lied to others and he lied to himself. Lie to yourself often enough and you might even start to believe it). It wasn't the accusation that had knocked the breath out of Robert. It was the wariness in Aaron's eyes, the trepidation in his voice. The anticipation of Robert revealing that he hadn't changed at all. It was an expression that he had seen on everyone who had ever mattered to Robert's face at some point or other. Victoria had looked at him that way countless times, as she asked whether he had lashed out at Andy again. Diane had looked at him that way, as Chrissie had outed him as a cheat in the Woolpack. But Robert hadn't expected that look from Aaron. Aaron had always been the one person who expected more from Robert. That was what hurt the most.

 

Countless people in Robert's life had wanted him to change. Aaron was the first person that Robert had wanted to change for, though. That had to count for something, Robert thought.

 

Robert finished off the whiskey, stayed in the cold farmhouse until the sky darkened outside. He ignored Aaron's barrage of apologetic texts, all the while knowing he was being unfair. Robert had just spent the past hour of his life revisiting his most unforgiveable deeds. He knew they were unforgiveable. But he was so desperate for Aaron to forgive them, even better to forget them. It was too much to expect. Love couldn't erase past wounds, only make them seem less important.

 

He returned to the village eventually. He might have been good at running away but he could never bring himself to run away from Aaron. He left feeling drained, defeated, drunk. Tomorrow, he would face Aaron again. Tonight was for dwelling and regretting and hoping.

 

Robert Sugden was an almost killer (depending on your definition of what it meant to kill someone really).

 

Robert Sugden was a liar.

 

Robert Sugden was a disappointment.

 

Robert Sugden loved Aaron Dingle with every fibre of his being.

 

Aaron made Robert want to be better.

 

Even Aaron couldn't erase Robert's past.

 

Those were the truths that Robert would have to find a way to live with.


End file.
